Picturing ourselves in new exhibit Survival of the Fittest

Carl Rungius (German, 1869 – 1959). Old Baldface, ca. 1940. Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches. JKM Collection®, National Museum of Wildlife Art, Jackson, Wyoming, © Estate of Carl Rungius.

An Oyster with teeth. A Hippopotamus with fins. A Crocodile with legs longer than a horse. An elephant smaller than a donkey with a trunk that flares more dramatically than a pair of bell-bottoms from the ’70s.

These are just snapshots of the animal representations that permeated Medieval animal paintings. It is from this tradition that the artists in the traveling exhibition at The Nelson-Atkinson Museum of Art arose: Survival of the Fittest: Picturing Wildlife and Wilderness. The exhibition was organized by the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, Wyoming, with the work from the National Museum of Wildlife Art and the Rijksmuseum Twenthe. It is the practices of such Medieval artists that the artists from this exhibition radically reject.

Medieval depictions of animals so often missed the mark, as many Medieval painters were unable to personally witness the animals they were depicting. With little to no ability to decrease the distance between themselves and their far-away animal-muses, Medieval artists were forced to view their subjects through foreign travel logs and (dramatized) tales of adventure stories. 

While Medieval artists dedicated a great amount of time and energy to their portrayals of animals, they were unable to convincingly capture an animal’s essence because they were viewing wildlife and wilderness through the lens of another’s perspective. Medieval artists who never sat with their subjects or sat within the spaces that their subjects lived, thrived, and died within were, as a result, never able to accurately paint them, simply because these artists never knew what they were painting.

The work of artists Richard Friese (1854–1918), Wilhelm Kuhnert (1865-1926), Carl Rungius (1869-1959), and Bruno Liljefors (1860-1939) of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art’s exhibition Survival of the Fittest: Picturing Wildlife and Wilderness signify a move beyond the art created by Medieval artists and King Frederick I of Sweden’s taxidermist. Rather than turning to the written accounts of another’s experience, to the corpse of a once great animal, or to an animal in a cage, the avenue many of these artist’s contemporaries were taking, the artists featured in The Nelson-Atkins’ exhibition all took it upon themselves to bear personal witness to their art’s subjects in the wild spaces they called home.

Richard Friese (German, 1854 – 1918). Three Polar Bears, 1912. Oil on canvas, 15 ¼ x 22 ½ inches. National Museum of Wildlife Art, National Museum of Wildlife Art, Jackson, Wyoming, Gift of Tim and Karen Hixon.

The exhibition as a whole uplifts the innovative artists who approached their wild subjects with patience and a will to brave the wilderness in order to ensure an authentic understanding of the wild. The intimate understanding these artists earned from their intentional engagements with wildlife and wilderness translated into an authenticity of artistic portrayal that had yet to be achieved in the animal art space.

First came Richard Friese. Born in Germany, Friese traversed from his homeland to Norway and the polar regions of the Arctic to sit in the tundra environments of the animal subjects he wished to realistically portray to his viewers. Beyond the polar regions north of him, Friese also traveled to German East Africa—today Burundi, Rwanda, the Tanzania mainland, and the Kionga Triangle, a small region later incorporated into Mozambique.

Friese, like every other artist in this exhibit, took advantage of the increased travel avenues between his birth country and Germany’s imperial colonies. The underlying truth for much of the paintings done in Africa depicting African animals by Europeans is that such works were made possible only because of what is known as the ‘African Scramble’, where European countries invaded and colonized much of Africa, instigating the slave trade and the mass exportation of African resources to Europe.

Richard Friese, South African Landscape with Springboks, 1876. Oil on canvas. Privately owned.

Enabled by the imperial relationship between Germany and German East Africa, Friese and his successors were in an emboldened position to travel across the world and view sights they would have otherwise not likely had access to. Radically, rather than continuing to view the African landscape through an extractive colonial lens, the artists in this exhibit inserted themselves into wild landscapes to sit earnestly, open-heartedly, and patiently, allowing the African wildlife to resume its natural behavior. It was only after the animals prowled past their line of sight that these artists picked up their brushes.Only when life was being lived around them did they begin the project of their art.

Fellow German artist, Wilhelm Kuhnert, took great advantage of the ability to travel to German East Africa. His dedication to depicting the animals of Africa, particularly the African lion, earned him the nickname “Lion Painter”—a very dull nickname as far as they go. Nonetheless, his dedication to the lion enabled all those consuming his work in continental Germany the ability to enjoy the violent splendor of a lion’s form without seeing it roar themselves.

Kuhnert’s ability to accurately display animals was of such a caliber that he provided illustrations for zoologists Alfred Brehm and Johann Wilhelm Haacke. Kuhnert also supplied illustrations for Cologne Chocolate Company’s trading cards. His work in the non-gallery spaces enabled those who had never traveled to appreciate the beauty and grandeur of the natural world beyond their reach.

Carl Rungius, a fan of Richard Friese’s work, similarly contributed to the general public’s knowledge of the animal world. Unlike his counterparts, German-born Runguis did not visit and paint the scenes of Africa—He spent the majority of his adult years in North America, painting and illustrating the wildlife of the Rockies and the American Southwest.

Wilhelm Kuhnert, Elephants, c. 1917. Oil on canvas. 48 x 86 inches. JKM Collection®, National Museum of Wildlife Art.

While it is Rungius’ incredibly life-like paintings of North American moose and rams that are featured in the Survival of the Fittest: Picturing Wildlife and Wilderness exhibit, it is actually Rungius’ illustrated scenes that have had the most cultural impact. At the time, Rungius was sketching and painting illustrated books, pamphlets, brochures, and periodicals, which were the public’s main source of information on wildlife and wilderness. Thus, while his paintings were acclaimed, his illustrated contributions to circulated literary works touched and educated the most lives.

More so than any other artist featured in The Nelson-Atkins’ exhibit, Rungius dedicated his artistic energies to protecting the landscapes and lives he was sketching. At the time he began painting, there were already great concerns over the plight of overhunting in the United States. Rungius, in reaction to these environmental concerns, dedicated the art he made towards preservationist publications.

Interestingly, at odds with Rungius is the fourth and final artist featured in the Survival of the Fittest: Picturing Wildlife and Wilderness exhibit, Bruno Liljefors. While he, like his compatriots, painted the landscape of each of his works in the wild landscape itself, Liljefors painted his animal subject either purely from memory or from his collection of caged specimens. He even went as far as to, at times, kill the animal he wished to paint, and pose its lifeless form as he desired. The few times that Liljefors used violence against his animal subject, this violence shines through in subtle examples of unnaturalness in the final painting.

As seen in his painting Eagle and Hare (1904), a painting in which Liljefors killed an eagle, the eagle’s feathers do not correctly react to the dramatic dive the bird is taking. This is due to the fact that the eagle was never seen diving in such a manner; it was rather killed and positioned in such a way by Liljefors to dramatize the predator-prey interaction. The wind is not ruffling the eagle’s wings because there is no wind beneath its wings. Like the Lion of Gripsholm Castle, yet in a much more subtle way, a dynamic animal is again made into a doll to be manipulated by an ‘artist’ playing god.

While Liljefors, at times, engaged with unnaturally violent means of modeling, he—like his contemporaries—wholly dedicated himself to engaging with the environment that each of his wild subjects lived within. Each of the artists of Survival of the Fittest: Picturing Wildlife and Wilderness painted outside. Be it snowing, raining, 110 degrees, disruptive, or dangerous, they stayed out in the wilderness in order to better understand the wild; they put their survival at risk in order to picture the wild and wilderness.

Bruno Liljefors, Eagle and Hare, 1904. Oil on canvas. Private collection.

One reason each of the exhibit’s animal scenes are so compelling is because of this explicitly given dedication to the landscape of each work. The natural back and foregrounds are given as much attention as the animals themselves. This commitment to the wilderness demonstrates the intimately reciprocal relationship between the wildlife and the wilderness. One is as important to the other, because one informs the other, and vice versa. To understand the wildlife, one has to understand the wilderness; it is only in getting to understand both that you can glean a holistic understanding of the ongoing story of the wild.

In the same way that Friese, Kuhnert, Rungius, and Liljefors each gave time to the environment that their subjects lived within, to best survive, we too need to give time, energy, and attention to the contexts that we are arising from. It is only by intentionally and reflectively sitting within the spaces that our lives are lived within that we can better understand ourselves and our place in our environment.

Survival of the Fittest. To best survive in our own literal and internal wildernesses, we need to do as the exhibit’s leading artists have done. We must approach our lives with intention. We must be patient with the time it takes for life to feel like it has resumed to what is natural. We must, like the exhibit’s animal subjects, adapt to ensure that if a state of peaceful naturalness does not feel possible, we make it possible.

We do this by understanding our environments. Understanding the true constraints and laws of ourselves. We cannot do this by treating those around us and ourselves with violence, as Liljefors did with his eagle model, because this will lead to a misunderstanding of the truth of our nature.

We must be kind to ourselves. We must take the time to know ourselves and our environments in order to understand the full picture of our lives.

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Contemporary Art’s Survival of the Fittest: Picturing Wildlife and Wilderness exhibit is on display Sunday, July 27, from 2:00 p.m. to 4:00. The event costs $10 for members and $13 for the public.